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- Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In these essays Virginia Woolf explores the nature of the finite self and how individual experience might be relayed. She discusses the rights of women, the revolutions of modernity, social inequality and the future of the novel.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882–28 March 1941) was an English novelist, critic and publisher. She was born to an affluent and influential London family; her father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) was the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. With other contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield, Woolf became a key figure within, and partisan advocate of, literary modernism. Her novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928) and Between the Acts (1941), and her campaigning non-fiction includes A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). She wrote extensive criticism, often for newspapers, and this was collected in works including The Common Reader (1925 and, second series, 1932) and The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). As co-founder, with her husband Leonard Woolf, of the Hogarth Press, Woolf published many of her contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot. In 1941, Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse, near her Sussex home.
Joanna Kavenna is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction including The Ice Museum, Inglorious, The Birth of Love and A Field Guide to Reality. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the LRB, the New Scientist, the Guardian and the New York Times, among other publications. In 2008 she won the Orange Prize for New Writing, and in 2013 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists..
VIRGINIA WOOLF: ESSAYS ON THE SELF
–
with an introduction by
Joanna Kavenna
Contents
Joanna Kavenna
– Introduction –
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) wrote scintillating prose on a variety of themes, but I have chosen to focus this selection on the ‘self’. So the question I should immediately answer is why? Why not choose the rights of women or the revolutions of modernity or the phases of the novel? Why start grappling with the finite and possibly illusory self? Why drag Woolf in as well? What is the self? What does it mean? Whose definition? The self of the artist, or their social self? The self of the individual coerced by ordinance, the self behind the mask? Yet where does mask end and self begin? One self, or an inestimable quantity? Shifting, or indivisible?
The essays in this collection are, of course, not merely concerned with the self. Woolf does also discuss the rights of women, the revolutions of modernity, the past, present and future of the novel. She is eloquent on social inequality and the agony of war. She is a robust literary antiquarian, she rakes through the past in search of treasure. She is transfixed, as well, by the aesthetic contests of the present, the dynamic incompleteness of her era. She fights with local demons, she mocks those who mock her, and generally prevails. The essays I have chosen were written between 1919 when Woolf was 37 and 1940 when she was 58. During this time, Woolf changed, many times over, her opinions changed, her circumstances too; she was not a fixed entity, reiterating a rigid and immaculate position each time she picked up her pen.
Yet, in answer to my self-imposed question: the question of the self is central, in some way, to every essay in this collection. Woolf is transfixed by the nature of the finite self (‘Who am I?’ ‘Who is everybody else?’) and how individual experience might be discerned and relayed. This individual self is anyone, everyone, and yet each self is utterly distinct. Each self exists once on earth, in one moment of collision with everything around – Reality, Society, the beauty, ecstasy and tragedy of ordinary life. Each one of us speaks of ‘myself’ and ‘yourself’, distinguishing the lone self from a bewildering array of other selves. Yet, as Woolf acknowledges, this is also the enterprise of any writer: to discern the self in a crowded room, to isolate a single vantage point, to communicate this vantage point to others. How to express the perceptions of this self, in received language, within the baggy old conventions of the novel, and yet without sacrificing any trace of authenticity or personal realism? – this is the dilemma of any writer who is not enslaved by choice or compulsion to an overarching ideology. The originality of the self is the one certain route to originality in art; the self, undisguised and unbridled, is inevitably distinctive.
Yet ‘the self’, the belief in a composite entity to which we might attach this term, is a kind of ideology, as Woolf also realises. Seventy years after Woolf’s death, this notion of the Self has been incorporated into a quasi-religion of the predominantly secular West. Though the immortal self has faded into the shadows, the physical self is enhanced and perfected through exercise and dieting; the inner self (with continuing Cartesianism) by psychoanalysis. The self is venerated in ‘selfies’ and ‘self-help’; in the professional self-revealing of celebrity selves. The Herculean battles of this self are fodder for books, films, twitter feeds and blogs. The Internet is full of the cries of competing selves. Express/promote yourself, runs the mantra. And in the last two decades we have come to know a new version of the self: the incorporeal cyber-self, the self of the virtual realm, which moves freely through the great expansion into nowhere. Meanwhile, some of our contemporary sciences, neuroscience preeminent among them, seek to understand the self in terms of bodily ‘matter’, to map the boundaries of the self with fMRI scans of the brain. Thus develops an intriguing dissonance, in which the self is even, at times, dismissed as nothing more than a sad illusion of the brain. This theory of the self as self-deluding non-self is intrinsically self-annihilating: if the self is an illusion then the conclusions of this self are also an illusion, so the conclusions of the illusory self that it is an illusion, must themselves be an illusion. ‘Orts, scraps and fragments,’ as Woolf wrote in Between the Acts, her final novel.
When Woolf was writing these essays, the self was undergoing particular analysis and redefinition. ‘God is dead,’ Nietzsche cried, and the eternal self languished as well. Not everyone was a devout Nietzschean, of course. Earlier, Descartes had readjusted the Christian self, refashioning the old relationship of soul-body as the Cartesian mind-body dialectic. With the Freudian self, the binaries of Cartesianism or Christianity are adjusted again and the self becomes a conscious and unconscious entity, afflicted by sublimated impulses and traumas. Jung proposed a combined Ur-self, the collective unconscious, a shared transtemporal intimation of reality. The modernists are now famous for their preoccupation with the waking dream of the self, expressed in prose as a ‘stream of consciousness’ – a free-flow of often surprisingly lucid phrases, to represent the fleeting thoughts of the self. Knut Hamsun, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot and Woolf turned inwards, to the inner self; they lifted the social mask of their characters, or imagined they might.
For Woolf, and for novelists in general, and for humans in general, the subjective self is a mystery that cannot be solved by the subjective self. To embark on such analysis is to recede perpetually – the self, viewing the self, viewing the self – to be afflicted by the grammar of madness. Yet, if the self is an illusion, it is an illusion experienced by each one of us, and is, therefore, an ironic empirical reality, if only to the experiencing individual. With this in mind, Woolf sets herself against a particular theory of reality, which she calls ‘materialism,’ and which she associates with the generation above her and the century behind her. In the opening essay, ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf explains that something is not right. The writer is
… constrained … by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest … The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn … Is life like this? Must novels be like this?
No! cries Woolf. She calls for the writer to be ‘a free man and not a slave … [to] base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention’. In a 1924 essay, ‘Character in Fiction’, Woolf mocks the confident creation of taxonomies: ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed.’ This is a provocation, but she wants to distinguish her enterprise from pseudo-objectivism in general, the belief that there is one all-encompassing reality which may be agreed upon by collective observation of the material world. The mere accretion of physical detail can no longer adequately set a scene or explain a character, she adds. The self, with all its vivid yet intangible impressions, is the only reality she cares to consider. At the time, the novelist Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) had recently proposed that the younger novelists could not create ‘real’ characters. ‘I ask myself,’ Woolf writes, ‘what is reality? And who are the judges of reality? A character may be real to Mr Bennett and quite unreal to me.’ Bennett and his peers have
developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.
Woolf’s generation of authors, she adds, must find new protocols, to express the experiential reality of the self. ‘Character in Fiction’ ends with a passionate appeal to the reader, to support this sketchy, half-formed enterprise, to understand it:
In the course of your daily life this past week you … have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder. Nevertheless, you allow the writers to palm off upon you a version of all this … which has no likeness to that surprising apparition whatsoever …
Authors must communicate the true experience of the self; they must not ‘palm’ readers off with fainting mendacious pseudo-realities which only exist in novels. The contemporary novel, Woolf adds, has become like a conversation that begins with drab homilies about the weather and never graduates onto anything else. Anyone who loves to read will have experienced moments of recognition, when the writer seems to say, ‘I am in the dark, like you, but I understand, I feel as you do too.’ If authors rely on small-talk and self-concealment, then readers are left in solitude; the connection is lost.
So, the writer must communicate freely and honestly, without recourse to anaemic literary orthodoxies and expected ways of seeing. But the reader must make an effort in return. In ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ Woolf suggests that the reader must ‘banish … preconceptions when we read’:
Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other.
This chimes with D. H. Lawrence’s mock-theory of ‘human relativity’ (Fantasia of the Unconscious, 1922):
One is one, but one is not all alone. There are other stars buzzing in the centre of their own isolation. And there is no straight path between them. There is no straight path between you and me, dear reader, so don’t blame me if my words fly like dust into your eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of like music into your ears. I am I, but also you are you, and we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity. You are not me, dear reader, so make no pretentions to it. Don’t get alarmed if I say things. It isn’t your sacred mouth which is opening and shutting.
Writers who become nervous about this sort of readerly disapprobation may fall into the fatal trap of pandering to the realities of others, discarding their own. Instead of Lawrence’s ‘I am I, but also you are you,’ they say, bashfully, ‘I am you, we are all the same, dear reader, do not be afraid.’ But to pretend there is only one version of reality, and only one self, is ruin and death! In ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ Woolf suggests that bad writing may derive from a flimsy recall of the self. Dismissing a few merely half-decent authors, she explains, ‘they had not the artist’s power of mastering and eliminating; they could not tell the whole truth even about their own lives; they have disfigured the story that might have been so shapely.’ This is the drab grey fate reserved for those who lack conviction. Yet, the rewards are considerable, even celestial, if the writer can only ‘tell the truth’. ‘One is one, but one is not alone. There are other stars buzzing in the centre of their own isolation,’ as Lawrence writes. Woolf’s reality, Lawrence’s reality, the many realities of many readers, Arnold Bennett’s reality, are all subjective, partial. There is no absolute reality, nothing adamantine or eternal. Yet this need not stymie the self, it can even liberate it, because there is no need to defer to Arnold Bennett’s version of reality, or anyone else’s, as it pertains to life and as it pertains to fiction.
So, Woolf’s enterprise has much in common with Lawrence, but it is also akin to the enterprises of Paul Cézanne or Giorgio Morandi, painting their still lives, over and over again, trying to relay their singular impressions of reality to others. It is the enterprise of any hyper-subjective artist or writer, anyone who believes that reality is the unique vision of a distinct individual, that society seeks to smudge and even obliterate this vision, to replace it with a collective reality, the same for everyone, mendacious, meaningless. As Nietzsche says, ‘Are you genuine? or just a play-actor? A representative?’ Do you suppress your true perceptions of the world, in deference to a given version of reality, or do you insist on your own small project of (possibly illusory) autonomy: ‘I am I’?
In ‘A Letter to a Young Poet’, Woolf conveys these revelations to John Lehmann, a young author (at the time – 1931), who later worked with Woolf and her husband Leonard at the Hogarth Press. Poetry, she explains, is the faithful expression of the ‘self that sits alone in the room at night’, and ‘bad poetry is almost always the result of forgetting oneself – all becomes distorted and impure if you lose sight of that central reality’. Again, we have the lone perceptive self, trying to communicate; again this is our paradoxical ‘central reality’. So, the great challenge is ‘to find the right relationship, now that you know yourself, between the self that you know and the world outside’. How to do this? It is risky, difficult; the path is not straight, as we have heard. Trust yourself, Woolf suggests, live within the agony and strangeness of quotidian life:
All you need now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts in another, until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all these separate fragments … What I mean is, summon all your courage, exert all your vigilance, invoke all the gifts that Nature has been induced to bestow. Then let your rhythmical sense wind itself in and out among men and women, omnibuses, sparrows – whatever come along the street – until it has strung them together in one harmonious whole.
Do not despair, do not reside in obscurity. ‘Exert all your vigilance’, ‘wind’ your perceptions into a crafted ‘harmonious whole’. If you have achieved this, then who can say if your version of reality is true or false, real or unreal, good or bad? It is your own version, your own ‘harmonious whole’; you have spoken it, and no one else.
With this always in mind, Woolf responds passionately to those writers – past, present – who deal honestly with the reader, who express their own variations on the ‘I am I’ – the selective vision of the finite self. In this selection I have included Woolf’s fine character studies of several authors, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who ‘seems not a man, but a swarm, a cloud, a buzz of words, darting this way and that, clustering, quivering and hanging suspended’. He is, Woolf adds, so complex, so eccentric, that we ‘become dazed in the labyrinth of what we call Coleridge’. He was incapable of adopting requisite social modes, of suppressing his obsessive urge to talk, of pandering to the expectations of others. Woolf tries to capture a ‘clear picture’ of Coleridge but this metaphor is skewed and what she really reveals is a voice – mad and beautiful – never to be heard again:
[I]t mattered not where he found himself or with whom, Keats it might be or the baker’s boy – on he went, on and on, talking about nightingales, dreams, the will, the volition, the reason, the understanding, monsters, and mermaids, until a little girl, overcome by the magic of the incantation, burst into tears when the voice ceased and left her alone in a silent world.
Woolf applauds Coleridge because he was so consummately himself, despite the carnage of his life. The antithesis to Coleridge is the author who is richly rewarded for their elegant reiteration of a pre-existing role, for becoming recognisable and coherent to others, because falsified and simplified. Some of these authors may adopt available guises even as standard-issue rebels, or vanguard poets, or tormented philosophers. But, Woolf suggests, if in doing so they deviate from their own subjective truth then they are putting on masks, suppressing themselves in line with social ordinance. In a character study of William Hazlitt, Woolf quotes Hazlitt on this theme:
It is the mask only that we dread and hate; the man may have something human about him! The notions in short which we entertain of people at a distance, or from partial representation, or from guess-work, are simple, uncompounded ideas, which answer to nothing in reality; those which we derive from experience are mixed modes, the only true and, in general, the most favourable ones.
‘Hazlitt was right,’ Woolf adds, simply. However ill-favoured, the real man (or woman) behind the mask is always preferable. In the penultimate essay of this collection, Woolf turns to the eighteenth-century writer and politician, Horace Walpole, who wrote voluminous and celebrated letters. His works no longer fly off the shelves, but, Woolf explains, he is a perfect example of the bright bold self, who must communicate honestly with others, or not at all. ‘He is a man of short-range sensibility; he speaks not to the public at large but to the individual in private.’ Therefore, he speaks as himself, he has no reason to do anything else. This is, Woolf argues, ‘the humane art’, and Walpole’s work supplies ‘the map of one human face’.
Walpole’s ‘humane art’ is the art of personal realism – fractured, imperilled and utterly subjective, and yet, a necessary antidote to pseudo-rationalism. Dogmatism inflames Woolf, the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (William Blake) that enslave the individual. In ‘Professions for Women’, she describes how prescriptive conventions may obliterate the writerly trance:
I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers … The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream … Men, her reason told her, would be shocked … She could write no more.
The self of any man or woman is trammelled by social conventions. Yet, at the time Woolf wrote, the selves of women were bound by a particular array of stymieing conventions, applied with reference only to their sex. (It is clearly ironic, with this in mind, that Woolf uses the masculine personal pronoun throughout all these essays, in the archaic sense, to represent both men and women.) In ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ (1940), Woolf returns to traditions of power, and the way they silence women: ‘There is no woman in the Cabinet; nor in any responsible post … All the idea makers who are in a position to make ideas effective are men. That is a thought that damps thinking, and encourages irresponsibility. Why not bury the head in the pillow, plug the ears, and cease this futile activity of idea-making?’ Yet, she refuses to concede, quoting Blake again, ‘“I will not cease from mental fight …” Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.’
A crucial point. In 1948, writing in the New York Times, Diana Trilling famously dismissed Woolf for existing in a ‘special realm’ of wealth and privilege, with her hyper-subjectivism condemned as social elitism, and nothing more:
Art, Mrs Woolf felt, must be freed from its dependence on material fact; it must not suffer to be tied to the common fate of ordinary human beings; it must create and celebrate a beauty which is larger than ‘reality.’ But obviously here is a very limited and limiting aesthetic, and one whose roots are very close to the surface of Mrs Woolf’s personal experience. It puts it perhaps crudely but, I think, truthfully, to describe it as the aesthetic only of someone whose special circumstances dictated a cruel antithesis between art and life. Mrs Woolf’s picture of life is as of a wild horde of hostile influences beating at the walls of her private sanctuary.
Trilling’s phraseology is sometimes nebulous, including ‘a beauty which is larger than “reality”’. Yet, this view of Woolf as an invalidish snob has preponderated among her detractors. It is true that Woolf, as she admits in these essays, was independently wealthy. She also makes some startling remarks that betray her elevated social status, concerning the manners of her cook, for example. Naturally it is also considerably easier to sound a cry for individualism when you have sufficient wealth to publish your own work, without any concern for the market. However, Trilling suggests that, because of Woolf’s ‘special circumstances’, we must dismiss her hyper-subjectivism as the strangulated protests of an aristocrat cowering in the face of humanity at large: ‘Art … must not suffer to be tied to the common fate of ordinary human beings.’
In this way might we dismiss great swathes of artists and writers: Count Leo Tolstoy, for being the wealthy beneficiary of the peasant-annihilating tradition of entail. Or Lord Byron, or the Earl of Rochester, or Percy Bysshe Shelley, or Aleksandr Pushkin, or Lucian Freud, or Sir Philip Sidney, or Sir Edmund Spenser or innumerable further denizens of the social elite, or those in receipt of their patronage. By association, we might dismiss Shakespeare for taking the coin of the oligarchy, or D. H. Lawrence for consorting with the wealthy Ottoline Morrell. We might dismiss George Orwell’s wonderful essays on politics and inequality and even inauthenticity, because he was an Old Etonian. If we take the argument to its logical conclusion and dismiss any artist or writer whose circumstances deviate in any way from the ‘common fate of ordinary human beings’ then we must dismiss all artists and writers, because it is not remotely ordinary to be an artist or writer, it is a weird and anomalous thing to be, and until very recently the levels of education required for such activities were withheld from non-wealthy men and almost all women. Even today, these anti-professions generally require either personal wealth or a form of obsessiveness verging on a personality disorder.
Would Woolf have risen to such prominence in the 20th century, and beyond, would she have become practically the only truly famous female modernist, had she been born to impoverished parents, had she lacked literary connections and any sort of education? She explains the matter herself, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), with reference to her invented character, ‘Shakespeare’s sister’, a female genius from a non-wealthy background who dies in obscurity. Woolf writes passionately in support of working women, in these essays and throughout her writing. Yet she also understands that even privileged women can never be entirely in synch with wider society, unless they agree that their unique personalities and predilections must be blurred and assessed on the grounds of something that is not society, because they are all, in their honest and unveiled moments, completely alien, completely excluded, because they are all assessed on the grounds of something which is not the whole of them: their appearance, their social status, their name or background, their race, and so on. All individuals are outsiders in society, because society is always a concocted truth, a generality, that subdivides and taxonomises in general.
‘Hear me!’ wrote Nietzsche. ‘For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.’ We have already cited D. H. Lawrence, sounding his ‘I am I’. Similarly, in ‘Song of Myself’ (1892), Walt Whitman sounds his ‘barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world’. When Whitman writes, ‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself’, it is not onanism, in the self-help Oprah ‘express yourself, be yourself’ vein. Whitman means, again, ‘I am here, and this is my song.’ Who will tell Whitman that he really mustn’t yawp, because his opportunity to yawp derives from the ‘special circumstances’ of Western patriarchy? Who else might we thereby exclude, on the grounds of ‘special circumstances’? If anything, Woolf’s mantra of personal realism, or hyper-subjectivism, aims to dissolve such ‘special circumstances’ entirely. She fixes, I suspect, on hyper-subjectivism because it is a way of describing and decrying social exclusion without focusing solely on the exclusion of women. But also, it is because she feels ill at ease in general, and she assumes others feel the same way too.
This is not merely the plaint of the artist or author. Each one of us is defined, each day, and variously, and in ways that have little to do with the finite individual
